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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZSOFT MACHINEUK jazz-rock outfit, formed from '61 group Wilde Flowers with nucleus from a Canterbury school, and which also included members of Caravan, Kevin Ayers and Daevid Allen. They were named from a William Burroughs novel. Their first single produced by Kim Fowley with Jimi Hendrix on rhythm guitar flopped, and they later supported Hendrix on a U.S. tour; the trio of Ayers, Robert Wyatt and Mike Ratledge (without Allen, who had been refused re-entry to the UK because he had overstayed his previous visa, stayed on the Continent and formed Gong) made an eponymous album there, badly produced by Tom Wilson, according to Ayers, starting with good ideas and resulting in a sloppy, amateurish album. They disbanded, re-formed in UK with members of a Keith Tippett group and carried on, personnel fluctuating constantly, often including Karl Jenkins on reeds and keyboards, Ratledge on keyboards, Wyatt, then John Marshall on drums; Roy Babbington, bass; John Ethridge, guitar; Allan Wakeman on reeds, and others. They were influential at the time (especially the first four albums) with jazz-influnced voicings and free-form improvisations; they played at the Proms '70, the annual BBC classical festival at the Albert Hall. But they were individuals each trying to figure out what the music was supposed to be, and finally everybody pulling in different directions became unsustainable: Wyatt was the most extrovert and seemed to be unhappy in the group, yet decades later still found the memory of his expulsion extremely painful. Albums were The Soft Machine (charted in USA '68) and Volume Two '69 on Probe; Third '70 and Fourth '71 (both charted in UK), plus Fifth, Sixth, Seventh all on CBS; then Bundles '75, Softs '76, Alive And Well In Paris '78 on Harvest, Land Of Cockayne '81 on EMI. They also played on Faces And Places and Rock Generation albums on French Byg, and had a cult following in France as did Gong. Spaced '96 on Cuneiform recycled a Roundhouse gig from '68. See entries for Ayers, Jenkins and Wyatt. Daevid Allen (b Christopher David Allen, 13 January 1938 in Australia, d 13 March 2015 of cancer) never stopped celebrating his unique combination of hippie and psychedelic identities, participating in musical happenings all over the world, sometimes adopting monikers such as Divided Alien, Bert Camembert and Dingo Virgin, working in groups such as University of Errors, Big City Orchestra, Brainville 3, and others. |